


Mercy

by GwenChan



Series: Chronicles of a family [5]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Blanket Permission, Blood and Injury, Developing Friendships, Gen, Historical Inaccuracy, Injury Recovery, Language Barrier, Military, Period-Typical Racism, Podfic Welcome, World War II, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:13:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26534911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GwenChan/pseuds/GwenChan
Summary: Lost and alone in the Hell of Guadalcanal, Matthew has to rethink all his belief when his only help comes from the enemy he had been trained to kill.
Relationships: America (Hetalia) & Canada (Hetalia), Canada (Hetalia) & England (Hetalia), Canada (Hetalia) & Japan (Hetalia)
Series: Chronicles of a family [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/459409
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	Mercy

_ One of these days, we will leave you behind _

That had been Matthew's comrades favourite saying since the day they met him. They always said it, joking, of course.

Matthew laughed, but with less enthusiasm. It came with years of childhood spent waiting in a room for someone to notice him. Often people jumped in his presence, startled. With a hand on their chest, they asked where the hell did you come from. And Matthew had always been there, in plain sight.

Even months into drilling, his superiors kept yelling when, during inspections, they didn't see him where was supposed to be. They screamed at top of their lungs, asking where the hell he had gone and threatened the worst punishments; 

Then they looked again and there he was, right under their nose, as he had always been. Like he appeared out of thin air.

Most of the time Matthew just shrugged, a stretched smile on his face. 

He knew it was a joke. He knew they were a team, that his friends would never abandon him. 

After all, he wasn't really invisible. 

\---

And yet, it had happened. The joke became an ironic reality. In a matter of seconds, he was alone, miles from home, in the middle of a boiling hell. 

All around him was an inferno of burning jungle, ashes, gunfires and corpses so scarred and dirty with blood and mud to be completely unrecognizable

His comrades had counted, checked for any survivor and left him out of the list; only a number that someone one day would put in a history book when the war ended. 

There had been no time to look back a second time, no chance to pick up the wounded, to control if any dead was still breathing.

For a moment, Matthew had had the hazy impression of someone grabbing his wrist for a bunch of seconds, enough to check his pulse and decide he too had bid the world goodbye. Whether he passed out immediately afterwards or was too weak to protest, it didn't matter. 

Someone had decided he didn't belong to the livings anymore and so he had stood there. They needed to save what was left. There had been neither time nor space for the old rule to not abandon anyone. 

Half of Matthew's face felt like being engulfed in flames. Even his bones itched. The prickled so bad it was torture.

Something was pressing on his back. Matthew shook it off with a jerking movement. He saw the remnants of another soldier roll away, face down. The horrible smell of burnt meat ripped its content right out of Matthew's stomach. A rush of acid flooded his mouth and he bent over to vomit on the ground. It dripped down his chin and already dirty uniform. 

At least, the corpse had his face hidden. At least, he saved him to witness how his flesh must have been burnt and mangled. 

Matthew shook his head to not think about how that corpse could have been him. A few more inches and it could have been him. 

In his adrenaline-watered memories, Matthew saw again the grenade drew an almost perfect arc right before his eyes; he heard the belated warning screams; he felt his body moving.

The soldier in front of him had been his unwilling shield, protecting him from the splinters and softening the heatwave. 

The air around Matthew crackled with the unnatural energy of a field after the battle. he struggled to sit up. Counting on dirty fingers, he asserted the situation as he had been taught. 

One: was alone. Two: was injured. Three: he was the only survivor. 

When he touched his cheek, the main source of his annoyance, he withdrew his fingers wet with blood, dirt and living flesh. Half of his mouth was pulled down and he couldn't focus from his right eye. 

Still, he felt less pain than he knew he should have felt. It must be the adrenaline, or all the hitting when he played hockey had really fucked up his pain-receptors. 

Examining his fingers and the massacre around him, he was tempted to curl up where he was, close his eyes and fall asleep. Then, he'd maybe woke up in a clean bed with a pile of buttered pancakes waiting in the kitchen and an honour medal hung on the wall. 

Matthew had wished for a medal for a very long time. Maybe with a fancy, high ceremony and a medal pinned on his chest, people would finally notice him. Matthew, the saviour. 

He often fantasised of when he would no longer be in someone else's shadow.

But it hadn't taken long for reality to hit him in all its harshness. Only some people were meant for medals and Matthew wasn't one of them.

He had won some trophies playing hockey, yes, but only as part of a team.

He would never win a medal. 

The thought, instead of giving him the final blow, was the unexpected push towards action. 

Matthew remembered perfectly the training for the situation, the precise and orderly sequence of actions to be taken to survive. 

He had just to follow the rules and praying Heavens the wound didn't get infected; not that Matthew had his hopes up. Bragging had never been his forte.

In making these considerations, he repressed his disgust for the corpses to check if they were carrying something useful. 

If he thought he had vomited everything in his stomach, he had to think again; even with a strong stomach trained with years of strange recipes. Some could have even been edible if uncle Arthur had a better relationship with cooking. Matthew's comrades were always amazed at how easily Matthew swallowed their rations. 

He wiped his mouth with an already dirty sleeve and kept searching. 

Each item he found was an extra chance to live until tomorrow. Any canteen that wasn't empty or destroyed was a blessing. The more he went on, with touches that gradually abandoned the delicacy of pity for the dead, the easier the search became. 

Having reached the tenth corpse, Matthew was now moving with anaesthetized confidence, both ears alert for any sudden and unusual noise. The livings were far more dangerous than the dead, perfectly still under his touch. 

And then one of the corpses moved.

It had been a flinch, but Matthew had no doubts. Heart thundering, he slipped the tip of his combat boots under the body and with the maximum care he could manage at the moment, he slipped it off. 

The joy of not being the only survivor burst. He was one of them.

"A good Jap is a dead Jap". 

Matthew had heard it ad nauseam, the message screamed in his ears for months till it carved itself in the folds of his brain. He heard it shouted during drunk victory celebrations, used as a way to count the deads after each fight.

One less for them. One more for us. 

He squatted on his heels and grabbed at his hair till his nails dug into his temples.

He had already killed. Of course. When shooting madly at everything that moved, it was impossible to not have killed someone. 

But this was different. This was not killing at a distance, without even thinking about what he hit because he didn't have the time. There was silence, no rattle of rifles to muffle the screams and fog his brain.

This was killing a single man - and enemy - and being close enough to hear the sound of his last breath. He would feel his heart stop beating. 

he would feel every last spasm of his body. 

This man was not collective to cover with a mask of terror. He was a living singularity.

At the same time, Mathew had a duty; a duty to his comrades, to his country and to the cause. He had a duty and it outweighed his need to save a conscience already out of saving. 

Taking care of the other until he recovered was out of the question. At the ** base camp, ** even if they managed to get back, there was no room for prisoners. Thinking about it, the benefits of a captured enemy were too limited for the effort and they couldn't afford another mouth to feed.

Even if Matthew wanted to put kindness or morality over what they tried to teach him since he enrolled, his pity would only make matter worse. 

The other man was in horrible shape, his breath coming in a rattling whistle. At this point, killing him was the real mercy. 

Matthew still had his knife attached to his side. Technically, killing was easy. It would only take a blow to the throat or the heart, a single blow charged with all the fatigue, the anger, the pain he accumulated in weeks of fighting. It would take a single blow and there would be a one less to fight.

Besides, wasn't it what they wanted? To die in battle? They would've done them a favour.

Someone would have said that a clean death was too kind. They would suggest leaving the man to the worms

Matthew inhaled a couple of times to calm down. He pressed the blade against the man's exposed throat, his hands shaking with a tremor that 

days of guerilla warfare should have long cancelled. 

His eyes watered, the salt painful on the living flesh. 

He tightened his grip on the knife handle, slick with blood and sweat, and turned his head away. 

The red that splashed onto him was a strange diversion in a sea of green.

***

If given the chance, Matthew would have ripped his face off with his bare hands. But he had to get hold of his rifle, ready to fire. It was the only thing that prevented him, for now, to scratch his flesh to the bone.

A feverish sweat kept falling onto his eyes. Each step was slower and harder than the previous one. 

Moving slowly should have helped to conserve some energy, but eventually, it only meant more time in the jungle. 

When Matthew tripped over another root, he knew this time he would not get up. Playing hockey, there had always been a point when one had to admit defeat and go to the infirmary, least he wanted to never play anymore. 

The fever had now blinded Matthew's good eye as well and he groped his way through a blurry mass of green. His mouth cracked with thirst, despite a humidity to thick it suffocated him.

What a pity, he would never receive a medal. By now, it would already be a miracle if someone found his body one day when there had been time to recover the deads. Given his life, chances he would blend into the jungle forever.

Giving in to the fatigue, Matthew thought of home.

***

When Matthew was little, his home had been a beautiful house with blue-painted walls and a raven-haired woman who held him on her lap and sang him lullabies. It was the twin beds and Alfred's constant kicks under the covers. 

One day mama fell on the ground and never recovered.

Then for a few weeks home had been the orphanage with the dormitories **** of thirty children. 

One morning one of the nurses called him and Alfred and told them to prepare their luggage. She took them to the port, boarded them onto a ship without much of an explanation. 

Eventually, she gave them to a young man whose thick eyebrows made him have a perpetual frown. Alfred laughed for it. Matthew hid behind the nurse.

Home became a cottage in the English countryside, a place with plenty of room to run around but not a single child to play with. It was always raining, a light, cold drizzle that seeped into the bones. There was too much silence. 

Matthew held his stuffed bear and prayed mama to come and get them soon, even though they had told him Mama would never return. Alfred stomped his little feet, threw tantrums and teased him; but Mattew knew he cried too at night.

Alfred had insisted for so long on returning to America that he had won. 

He was good at getting what he wanted.

So home had been a small, rundown flat in New Jersey; the fairy tales of uncle Arthur, who wasn't that bad; the cups of milk a honeyed tea before bed and the food always a bit burnt, but warm and aplenty. They ate everything without a protest because it could have been much worse.

Sometimes, when the crisis began to mellow, if they behaved, they could have pancaked for breakfast and just one spoonful of syrup.

All things considered, Matthew had a happy childhood.

He couldn't say the same of his teen years.

Almost from one day to the other, their home filled with ear-splitting screams and the noise of doors slammed late at night; Alfred packing and leaving; uncle Arthur sobbing in the kitchen; the stink of cheap gin; the ink stains on the table; the letters upon letters.

Matthew still remembered the look of disappointment in his uncle's eyes each time a letter returned sealed as if he was to blame for his brother's behaviour. 

Soon, he had got tired of shuttling between the two of them, constantly demanding his full support.

One could have been more permissive, realising they weren't kids anymore; no matter how much he insisted on denying reality. 

The other could temper a tiny bit his constant desire for freedom.

But they were both too stubborn for their own survival.

Matthew's choice to leave wasn't as improvised as it seemed; it exploded after months of silent pondering.

In retrospect, his final push had been understanding, in a moment of sudden clarity, how he would always live in his brother's shadow. His brother's absence had made the comparison only stronger. 

Matthew had been Mama's favourite, but he knew who was Uncle Arthur's pupil. In his lucid moments, he showered Matthew with compliments, because he was calm, obedient and well-mannered. 

More often than not, Uncle Arthur simply mistook him for Alfred, in pathetic swings of exaggerated affection and sudden hate.

One afternoon Matthew had written his reasons, thrown in his suitcase what little he needed to survive the first few days and walked out the door not looking back. At the bottom of the suitcase was his old stuffed bear: Matthew took him wherever he went. 

In the following months, Mathew had found himself maintaining a generally friendly relationship with his uncle. They met plenty of times. 

Still, he remained adamant on his decision of never returning. 

For six months his home had been a room so small there wasn't enough space for a bed. Moisture seeped through the walls and dripped onto Matthew's head. Soon mould covered everything, from Matthew's clothes to his studded bear. 

Alfred had invited Matthew to go staying with him. He was certain they could find an extra bed on campus. 

Matthew gave his polite refusal. Accepting the offer would bring him back into his brother's shadow, to be the other, the twin. 

He knew how to get by. He didn't need help. He had heard one of the local hockey teams was looking for a new player. He was good at playing hockey and passing the selections was just a formality. 

It was practice day, on the field early in the morning for warm-up laps, when the radio started broadcasting the first news of Pearl Harbor. 

When it was time, the whole team gathered to hear Roosevelt's speech. They had looked at each other and it was clear that none of them would refuse the call. Matthew had had a few more doubts. Off the hockey rink, 

he'd rather not use physical violence. Except, of course, when Alfred pushed a button too far and they fought on the kitchen floor.

Alfred had enlisted in early January. Matthew had read his short letter without too much surprise. Then he went to the hockey field. It was empty, no one but him and a man who had been turned down from serving for a defective heart.

The coach had told them to not return. There wasn't a team to train anymore. 

For Matthew Uncle Arthur's call had been the last push. Maybe it had been the new plea to make his brother reason; maybe hearing pride still lingering in his uncle's voice, the pride he always had when speaking about Alfred.

Matthew would only be the eternal second. He had enlisted the following week, just enough time to close his business.

After all, in the end, all had enrolled. 

He had stuffed his bear in one of his bags.

Matthew woke up to the sound of a foreign but vaguely familiar voice.

It sounded a bit like Uncle Arthur's voice when it was Matthew's turn to run errands on Saturday morning and he didn't want to roll out of the covers.

In truth, the voices were nothing alike.

Then the voice became more pressing and Matthew remembered the yelling of the sergeant who had trained his unit upon his first days as a recruit.

For a few seconds, he seriously considered the possibility of being dead and the voice the one who would welcome souls into the afterlife. Maybe if he shut his ears and pretend not to hear, they would eventually get tired and send him back.

But his hands were too heavy and the idea of lifting them to press against his ears seemed an impossible effort. Eventually, his training prevailed. 

Matthew forced his good eye open, blinking until it came into focus. He jerked up, despite the vague protests to stay down. 

It wasn't possible. He couldn't be alive. He had killed him. He stuck a knife in his throat and killed him. Perhaps the legends and the rumours were true. Perhaps, as some said, the Japanese were demons; or, he sucked at killing.

There was a makeshift bandage around the man's neck.

The latter, then.

Great! Matthew's hands ran to hold his gun more out of habit than for necessity. Not finding it was enough to push him to stand on shaky legs. The Japanese imitated him, with a step forward. Matthew took another back, tripped over a root and fell. The stranger stopped too and sat up, his face expressing more concern than hate. 

Matthew studied him from a safe distance, his body ready to spring, his mind in utter confusion.

From that day of infamy, the soldier before him and all his fellows had been enemies, only enemies and nothing else. Enemies to kill and to destroy.

Yet, the man hadn't shown any sign of wanting to attack him. Instead, until proven otherwise, he must have taken care of him until his recovery. A futile effort, if he wanted him dead.

But Matthew had long stopped dreaming. The man must plan to take him to the first Japanese base camp to torture and squeeze information from him to the last drop. Strange then the Japanese man wasn't already dragging him away.

In all of that, the Japanese man kept standing still in wait, dark hair and eyes under layers of mud. He was as alone as Matthew. He hadn't killed him yet. 

The first crack of doubt crept through Matthew's certainties. 

Even if the Japanese wanted to force him to guide to the nearest US base, he wouldn't live long enough to tell it.

The base, yes, had to return to the base. Shaking his head, he looked around for his backpack. After a brief examination, he found it leaning against a nearby tree. 

One eye always on the Japanese man, he moved with stiffness, his whole body protesting the effort. 

The backpack was lighter than he remembered. He opened it in a hurry. 

Not even the time of taking a couple of steps, his face went again on fire. Vertigo forced him down on the ground. His hands fumbled to touch his cheeks, his cheekbones as if the gesture could be of help. 

Footsteps muffled by the damp foliage carpeting the ground approached. There was that worried tone again, too kind for the moment. Too kind and too polite.

Once Matthew had been like this, polite and silent, unable to articulate a single protest, with hockey and ice as his only escape. 

Months of training had been devoted to purging compassion out of his body. The enemy would know no compassion. 

He would have been dead if it weren't for compassion. He would have already been food for worms. 

Uncle Arthur would have made his serious face, reminding him that every courtesy had to be thanked and repaid. Being in the middle of a hellish island, lost in the Pacific Ocean, was no excuse to forget his manners.

First, one had to introduce himself. 

Matthew pointed at his chest. Matthew. Matthew Jones, he said. After all, it was just a name. One of many. Matthew. The other did the same. Honda. Honda Kiku. Now the enemy had a name. It was difficult to kill people when they had a face and a name. Matthew's head was spinning. 

His kindness would have killed him. He put a hand to his forehead. He found it hot and darkness enveloped him. 

For all his illness, Matthew fought for his life and between two equally strong belief.

One: Honda Kiku was the Japanese soldier and therefore an enemy to be eliminated.

Two: Without Honda's intervention, Matthew would have been long dead. 

By the third day, Matthew's fever had lowered enough to stop being a threat. By the fifth, he considered himself out of danger. His last tendrils of doubts on Honda's intentions had vanished.

When Kiku collapsed from fatigue, Matthew returned the favour. By now, when he went to sleep, his rifle was to defend both. Closing his eyes, Matthew tried again to conciliate his instincts and months of indoctrination. 

He did his best to not think about what would happen after, once they found themselves each on their side of the barricade.

When Matthew woke up, invigorated despite everything, dawn must have just passed and Kiku was splitting a cookie into two perfect halves. He had a precision Matthew hadn't seen in a while.

Kiku handed him one half with a shadow of a smile. Then he said something Matthew imagined meaning "enjoy". 

As he nibbled the cookie with maddening slowness, he remembered an old, very old episode. 

It had been several years ago, when he and Alfred were still small enough to sit in Uncle Arthur's lap, all together in the same armchair to listen to the radio. 

Once, Uncle Arthur had looked at them for a long moment, his brow furrowed with his usual melancholy. But he hadn't chastised them. 

Instead, he had hugged them both, tightly, murmuring they were one of the few beautiful things in this world. 

He still smiled at the time.

There must be nice things to hold on to. Little things, like not having a fever and being able to eat the half of a wet cookie. There was a blessed silence, the jungle dampening the din of war, and unknown melodies hummed with a closed mouth. 

Kiku drew the lines of some ideogram in the mud. Matthew leaned over to get a better look. He pointed and made a doubtful face. It was enough to understand each other. Kiku continued to draw, but this time they were images and for each, they could exchange a translation.

Maybe they could have stayed there forever, new Robinson Crusoes, like in the adventure novels Uncle Arthur used to read when he and Alfred had got too old for fairy tales. 

They would hide in the heart of the jungle, where War hadn't arrived yet, and wait. Waiting for peace, or even just a truce, or perhaps the end of the world. Spend time telling each other their respective lives between drawings on the mud, gesturing where words weren't enough. 

Laughing despite everything at a silly joke or discovering with surprise Honda was much older than he appeared. 

From Matthew's math, he could easily be his father.

It was Kiku that brought Matthew back to reality. Eventually, Matthew had to agree. They were still at war, with no room for silly fantasies. For the moment, however, they could exchange cookies and words in a truce that tasted unreal

Tomorrow they would each be back to their group, with a loyalty that went beyond any possible esteem of even friendship.

And still, Matthew couldn't go back to see Kiku as a faceless enemy. He knew almost nothing about him. Kiku's reserve made Matthew's shyness pale in comparison. 

Matthew saved the name in a corner of his mind, promising himself to search again when the war was over.

They hadn't decided a time to go their separate ways, but it came, without too many warnings. Despite everything, it was less traumatic than expected, like waking up from a dream when even the last drop of sleep is gone. 

They debated whether to stay together to guide each other until they confirmed each other's safety, but since the advantage of one would mean the ruin of the other, they decided it was best to separate where they were, in neutral territory. Matthew couldn't tell if it was pity or pride. 

Face to face, Kiku leaned slightly forward with his head and torso in the Japanese manner. 

Matthew clicked his heels out of habit and, although it wasn't appropriate, he brought his hand to his forehead and saluted.

Matthew walked a path he made himself without stopping to look back, unable to tell whether out of fear or hope. 

Honda, however, seemed to have kept his word. The more Matthew advanced, the more the sounds of furious battles, the same the jungle had muffled, pressed onto him. He followed them to the first allied faces. There the war swallowed him again in its tremendous mechanism. 

The time for explanations was postponed.

There would be, later, between jokes and slaps on the back. It didn't take long for someone to nickname him  _ zombie _ , returned as he was from the world of the dead. Jungle Ghost. Lucky Boy. Burnt Face. They gave him many surnames.

On the French coast, the local pronunciation distorted his name. In Paris, an Uncle Arthur, older than his years, held him for a full five minutes, any military protocol be damned.

Later, when the war was over, Matthew would have to learn to live without a twin. He'd taken his mother's family name to cut all his links with the past. 

In Montreal, Matthew Williams, a war veteran with two medals to his name and captain of one of the strongest hockey teams in the league, had no siblings.

For the moment there were the questions, poured over him in a single stream. He nodded absently, forcing the good corner of his mouth into the usual weak and tired smile of circumstance.

He listened to the sound of the waves against the hull and the shouting of his companions. 

They were moving them elsewhere. They might have won that battle, but it was still just one stage in the grand scheme of events. Below them, the sea stirred restlessly. Matthew adjusted the new glasses on his nose. The right eye would never be the same again. He ran a hand through his short hair, surprised to find it clean after days spent in the dirt. 

They asked him how he had survived.

"A friend," he replied.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know it's a fantasy but I can have some fantasy as a treat.
> 
> Wanna know more about Alfred side of things? [Here, please](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22352284)
> 
> Wanna know about Arthur's instead? [Here ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7641001)


End file.
